We're delighted to announce that I Love Blue Sea has joined Vital Choice. We share the same passion for health and vitality, and we offer you easy access to an even wider variety of premium seafood that is among the purest and most nutritious available. Please accept our offer of a 10% discount on your first order. Simply use code ILOVEVC at checkout. Welcome to the Vital Choice family.

There is clinical evidence that Zocor—unlike some other statins and unlike Zetia—reduces the risk of heart attacks and other adverse cardiac events.

But a key question remains unanswered: Do statins bring these benefits by lowering cholesterol, or by other means, such as their ability to reduce inflammation markers associated with risk of adverse cardiac events?

As it should have, the surprising outcome of the Vytorin trial led to a series of newspaper stories on the increasingly shaky foundations of the cholesterol theory of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

Rather than make a case for or against the cholesterol theory of CVD, we'd like to direct you to the responses the Vytorin affair elicited from health writers at two major newspapers: The New York Times and The Boston Globe (see links below).

Cholesterol theory's weak underpinningsThe cholesterol hypothesis—whose lack of conclusive evidence argues against it even being called a theory –holds that high levels of cholesterol (especially LDL and VLDL cholesterol)—cause CVD.

In fact, the evidence that elevated cholesterol causes CVD has never enjoyed direct cause-effect evidence.

Instead, the hypothesis has been based on the kinds of correlations (statistical associations) that official bodies dismiss as inconclusive in all other contexts... including the potential roles of nutrients and antioxidants in disease prevention.

Despite this lack of solid cause-effect evidence for the cholesterol hypothesis of CVD, the US FDA automatically allows disease-prevention claims for any drug—such as Zetia—proven to lower cholesterol.

Incredibly, the agency allows therapeutic claims for cholesterol-lowering drugs... even drugs never proven to prevent major symptoms of CVD (e.g., buildup of arterial plaque) or its deadly outcomes, such as stroke, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and sudden death.

(Sadly, fish oil does enjoy such evidence, but as a non-patentable natural product, it is unlikely to ever get the funding necessary to get it through the nearly $1 billion drug approval process.)

The aforementioned articles—four from The New York Times and one from The Boston Globe—are presented here in order of publication date: